


SBURB Cooking Guide

by timelyTurnabout (mutecebu)



Category: Homestuck, SBURB Glitch FAQ
Genre: Cooking, FAQ, Replay Value AU, SBURB Guide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-30
Updated: 2012-04-30
Packaged: 2017-11-04 14:05:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/394694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mutecebu/pseuds/timelyTurnabout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are plenty of FAQs out there telling you how not to be horribly mangled by monsters; you won’t find much advice of that sort here. This guide, fellow player, is for the <i>second</i> most basic of needs: food.</p>
            </blockquote>





	SBURB Cooking Guide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GodsGiftToGrinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodsGiftToGrinds/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Sburb Glitch FAQ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/340777) by [GodsGiftToGrinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodsGiftToGrinds/pseuds/GodsGiftToGrinds). 



****  
Table of Contents:  


Introduction  
Alchemizing food  
Other SBURB things  
Real recipes  
Alchemy recipes  
Other Tips  
Contact

 ****  
Introduction  
  
Are you tired of munching on Biophosphoradelecrystalluminescence day in day out? Has your sprite gone the way of all digital constructs, and now you’re struggling to make it without an overpowered guide force-feeding you every half hour? This game takes months to complete, even in a session where nothing goes wrong. (Ha! Fat chance.) There are plenty of FAQs out there telling you how not to be horribly mangled by monsters; you won’t find much advice of that sort here. This guide, fellow player, is for the _second_ most basic of needs – food.

WHAT THIS GUIDE IS:  
This guide will help you eat right, using both alchemy and regular ‘ol cooking techniques. It’ll explain how to find food in SBURB, how to alchemize a meal that doesn’t taste like a chicken milkshake, and will include a couple of recipes that any pantswetting scamperpunk can cook quickly with stuff lying around the house.

WHAT THIS GUIDE IS NOT:  
How to cook gourmet food. Because who has time for that. Also, this is aimed towards homo sapiens with sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami taste buds (and nocioceptors). Not gelatinous silicon-based aliens who may be reading this guide. Sorry, slime-bro. You’re on your own.

So, without further ado, lets get to it!

 ****  
Alchemizing Food:  
  
Heads up: when I say “Duplicating”, I mean “making something using a code”. Everybody has their preferred terminology, so I’m just sticking with this. Anywhoo.

SBURB’s alchemy is not good with real food. If you cook a 5-star meal, captchalogue it, jot down the code, then eat the dinner, the food will taste fine. Captchaloging it does not change the food at all. However, if you use the code to duplicate that meal, well… at least, it’ll be food. It’ll fill you up and contain all those nutrients your guardian probably used to blabber on about. It’ll just taste like you put said food through the blender first, along with a few spoonfuls of pain yogurt and a handful of drywall.

The general rule-of-thumb: the less food-like, the better SBURB is at duplicating it.  
So, those of you with freezers full of frozen dinner- rejoice! Those will duplicate fine. Canned food? That’s about as far from real food as you can get. These duplicates taste slightly different, but if you’re eating canned food then you’re not really looking for gourmet in the first place, are you? In fact, if you mix ‘em up in the pantry you’ll have a hard time telling the difference.  
PROTIP: freezing a food before you get the code will let it duplicate better. You’ll still have to reheat the frozen duplicate, though.

However, you CAN duplicate anything you find in-game, no problem. If an eatable is generated by the game, duplicating it will taste fine. Admittedly, most game food is crap, but if you can get your waking self to your dream moon, you can attend a buffet and record as many captcha codes as possible before you get thrown out. (Captchaloging food for later is considered horrible manners).

Note: captchaloging the White Queen’s sorbet is a terrible idea that could get you killed but is _worth it_.

Recipe Modus  
Okay, lets talk about the Recipe fetch-modus. Jokes aside, it’s not as useless as everyone thinks it is. Sure, if you want to duplicate the item, any other fetch modus will give you the code already with no fuss. However – those codes will be different in every session (barring any hypothetical weird double-sessions), and when you start another playthrough, your compendium of codes goes *poof*. However, if that item is alchemizable at all in your new session, the “Recipes” have about a 70% chance of working again, if you remember them. And if you’re writing a FAQ, then it’s your only friend in a dark, dangerous world.

Speaking of which, how to get a Recipe Modus:  
ARRAY MODUS && COOK BOOK  
Yup, it’s as easy as that. Sometimes, any cook book will work; sometimes it needs to be Betty Crocker brand. Whatever. Anything that woman touches turns to gold, as far as I’m concerned.

 ****  
Other SBURB things  
  
Food and game mechanics:  
-I honestly have no idea if you have a “hunger” stat or not. However, some game scripts seem to activate when you’re particularly hungry, etc.

-Pretty much all food restores health, to some extent. Even chow you made yourself. The exact amount restored seems to be a function of nutritional value, whether or not you clean your plate, if you ate with good table manners, and how much you personally enjoyed the fare. (So if you pay attention and notice just how tasty my chili recipe is, it will restore more health. Just saying.)

-Some pre-programmed food has other benefits, like temporary buffs and such. Some of them are quite substantial, actually, like the 5-alarm’s mangrit boost. If you make food yourself, there’s still a chance of buffs, though they are difficult to predict.  
Foraging:  
Honestly… don’t bother. There’s plenty of edible stuff in your land, sure, it just tastes like all so much vegemite. In ideal circumstances, it’s only good as a last resort. If you’re starting a new game, there should be plenty of grub in your house. Just make sure to get the code for anything before you eat it. Hopefully it’ll last you until you can get a cookalizer and aliminator, which will make foraging obsolete.

If you need to, though: anything that glows is probably okay. The texture will vary widely, and the taste may differ some, but it’ll always be semi sweet, and hasn’t ever been poisonous in my experience.

Exceptions to the no-foraging advice:  
You can often find good food on the dream moons. Like I said above, that’s a great place to get codes for food that’s hot-and-ready out of the alchemitter. Apparently, you can also gorge yourself as your dreamself – apparently, any food your dreamself eats will fill you up too. (Thanks to [GodsGiftToGrinds](http://archiveofourown.org/works/340777/chapters/551606) for that tip)

Poisons:  
I mentioned poisons above, didn’t I? Well, don’t stress it - poisonous food is rare in SBURB, and almost never fatal. In general, if it looks semi-edible, it’s probably safe (no guarantees on the flavor, though). Whenever you get poisoned by something you ate, it’s always a scripted game event, and I’ve never heard of anyone dying as a result, short of “death by food poisoning with a complication of getting stepped on by a cyclops.” In general, you’ll have to do a short quest to find an antidote, and you’ll gain echeladder experience anyways. For me, it was “find the koala wearing a nurse’s hat.” I most definitely do not want to know where that hat came from.

Cookalizer:  
These are basically the greatest things since sliced bread. They cook food in seconds, never burn it accidentally, never undercook the insides, and only rarely give you cancer. (That last part was a joke. I hope.) The problem is, with the default setup they can only cook a food evenly and are little more than a spiffy microwave. I highly recommend jailbreaking it, and installing GamerGourmet’s firmware. It’s easier to use and is SO. FRIGGIN. COOL. Just look at its _bacon_ settings.

Where to get one:  
-You’ll sometimes find them in ruins, in chests in dungeons, or other random places in your quest. If you keep playing you’ll get one eventually. That might take you a month or two, though.  
-Tyranic Souschef (Prospit) and Overworked Cater (Derse) work in the palace’s kitchens, and will mail a cookalizer to your home spire as a reward for finishing their quest sequence. They’re pretty boring, but you can knock it out in just over an hour, and it’s an easy-in to swipe codes for banquet food using your real self. (Tyranic’s cookalizer will break after one use, though Gregarious Tinkerer will fix it for free.)  
-Mobius Tripp always has one, and is willing to let you copy the captcha-code. Just don’t steal his stuff. Tripp’s cool.

Aliminator:  
The aliminator can provide basic foods, using the magical properties of glowing-green uranium fuel supplies. It’ll keep you from going hungry. You can dial out a small number of basic foods. Specifically: milk, eggs, uncooked meat, a couple kinds of veggies, cereal, potato chips, swiss cake rolls, 5-alarm hot sauce, and kool-aid.

Where to get one:  
-These can sometimes be bought from consorts for boondollars (though I’ve never seen a cookalizer for sale, go figure).  
-Some camps of carapaces on the Battlefield have these.  
-If you collapse of hunger or exhaustion, you’ll wake up to find that you’ve been rescued and cared for by your consorts. They’ll likely be very excited to see you alive and well. Do this two more times, then they’ll get sick of saving your ass and will tell you so, but they’ll give you an aliminator and an enertron and warn you to “take better care of yourself”. You’ll take a hit to your land reputation (meh), and collapsing from exhaustion SUCKS, but the enertron is _almost_ worth it.  
-Like the cookalizer, if you don’t seek one out then you’ll find one _eventually_. One of my friends left his house immediately after entry and didn’t come back to it for three weeks. When he returned, he found the imps had completely furnished his house with a cookalizer, aliminator, projector screen, swimming pool, ball pit, and a mini bar.

 ****  
Seriously Ghetto Real-Life Recipes That Rock:  
  
I.e. food that you cook in a kitchen like a normal person, without weird game physics

#1 rule of cooking in SBURB: you can do without it. Seriously. If you see a recipe anywhere on the archives of the internet, you can usually cut out multiple ingredients and it’ll turn out fine. The recipes here are as bare-bones as possible – most of these will require little begging friends/alchemy experimentation to get obscure ingredients (because who has time for that).

Marinades  
These are the greatest weapon in your specibus. Chicken is cheap to alchemize, and steak comes free from an aliminator. Like so:

Chicken Teryaki:  


  1. grab a bag of chicken breasts
  2. pour a bottle of teriyaki sauce in there  

  3. let it chill (in the refrigerator) 3 hours or more  

  4. cook it whenever you feel like it.  




  
Italian Chicken:  


  1. grab a bag of chicken breasts  

  2. pour a bottle of Italian dressing in there  

  3. let it chill 3 hours or more  

  4. cook it whenever you feel like it.  




  
Worchester, etc. Steak:  


  1. grab some steaks  

  2. pour some worchester sauce, soy sauce, and throw in some garlic and onions (powdered or fresh).  

  3. let it chill 3 hours or more  

  4. cook it whenever you feel like it.  




  
Multi-purpose Marinade:  


  1. grab some [INSERT MEAT HERE]  

  2. pour in your base, which could be any combination of:  
Soy and/or teriyaki sauce  
Water + vegitable/canola/olive oil  
Yogurt (I’m serious!)  
Booze (SBURB is a game of growing up, after all) (No seriously, all you nagsprite wannabes- you’ll cook it so there’s very little alcohol left in the food. It’s okay because it’s science.)  
Ketchup  

  3. Add any combination of the following ingredients:  
Garlic powder, or garlic salt, or fresh garlic  
Onion powder (or fresh, or etc.)  
Sugar (brown or white)  
Black pepper  
Red pepper  
Paprika  
Cinnamon  
Lime juice  
Lemon juice  
Honey  
Mustard  
Chick-Fil-A sauce. (One packet goes a long way when you have an alchemitter!)  

  4. go into your guardian’s spice cabinet. Sniff the spices. If any of them smell good, throw them in.  

  5. let it chill for 3 hours or more  

  6. cook it whenever you feel like it  




  
Notice a trend?

How to cook it:  
There are loads of ways. My personal favorite: throw it on a frying pan on med-high heat. It’s done when you cut it open and it looks cooked all the way through. If you’re doing that, it takes nearly zero effort to pour extra marinade on it, and throw some frozen vegetables. Boom, nutrition.

Some people spew harangues like “marinade 8 hours maximum”. They are… misguided. I start a bag of breasts marinating in the fridge, go dungeon delving, and return to much them one by one over a few days. It’s totally fine. (Okay so I actually will eat them over the course of the week with great taste and no problems, but that may be a little too gross to recommend).

Chicken & Rice  
1) Cook chicken, as shown above. (The teriyaki/soy-based recipes work best)  
2) Cook some rice.  
3) Pour the chicken over the rice.  
4) VOILA.  
(Note: either put the marianade aside so that it never touches the chicken, or make sure you cook the marianade for as long as you cook the chicken.)

Bacon  
What more is there to say.

Raman noodles  
1) Follow the directions, nitwit.

Oh yeah. Nutrition and stuff. You can throw some deli lunch meat on a frying pan and cook it until it starts to shrivel, then mix it in. Any variant of “cheese-and-crackers” will mix in well, too. MASTERPIECE.

Teriyaki sauce:  
This is the greatest thing ever. If you don’t have it, here’s an easy way to make it. Once you make it once, it’ll usually duplicate fine, though I haven’t found a reliable alchemy formula.  
1/2 cup soy sauce  
1/2 cup water  
2 tsp. fresh or powdered ginger  
1/2 cup brown sugar (or regular sugar + maple syrup)

The Best Chili in Paradox Space  
Okay so this one takes more than 2 seconds to make, but this is like the one recipe in my repertoire that I made myself so haters gonna hate I’m putting it here. Pro: it tastes really good after it’s been refrigerated/reheated (like, possibly even better), so you can make yourself a whole pot to feed yourself for a while.

2 lb ground beef, browned (i.e. fry it in a skillet & drain the fat, or use a cookalizer)  
2 tablespoons of chili powder (chipoltle chili powder = even better. Like, woah, so good.)  
1/2 tbsp cumin + a dash more (secret ingredient!)  
1 “large” (12oz) can of tomato paste (other secret ingredient)  
1 large (~1.5lb) can of crushed tomatoes  
1 very large (2lb) can of kidney beans

cayane pepper to taste (more = more spicy. You may want to leave this out if you use chipoltle chili powder)  
1/2 tbsp rosemary  
1/2 tbsp paprika  
1/2 tbsp garlic powder  
2 bay leaves

Directions:  
1) brown the meat  
2) pour all that jank into a crock pot  
3) 45 minutes on high (7.32 seconds with a cookalizer)

-Optionally serve over tortilla chips  
-Cheese & Sour Cream for the win

Speaking of sour cream…  
The following recipe can be found in a Derse library. I do not recommend actually making this, though it might be a nice prank. I cannot be held responsible for any injury or other damages caused by berserk-trigger casting of endgame abilities.

//  
**Great Uncle Pawdabber's Pre-tend**  
**Ice Cream Showdown**

**Ingredients:**  
3 scoops (really) sour cream  
1/2 of shaved imp, amber  
1 bowl  
1 victim 

**Instructions:**  
Mix ingredients until golden brown  
//  
Yeah I haven’t tried that one yet.  
****  
  
  
****  
Alchemy recepies  
  
The problem is, most alchemy codes are different from session to session, so I can’t make a straight recipe list. However, I can give some general guidelines which, with a little fiddling, most people can get to work about 70% of the time. Naturally, these are hard to get right, and even if you’re close, there’s no guarantee it’ll taste good. However, if you make a winner, the code will work for the rest of the session.

Waybread:  
Regular bread || Energy drink  
Saltine crackers && biophosphoradelecrystalluminescence  
Protein shake && a gun

Fills your health vial by about 20%, will keep a player on his feet for a day of long adventuring. Literally – you are unable to sit down.

Magic Marinara:  
Tomato && Special Stardust

Candy straw/utensil/etc:  
[any candy] && [any utensil]  
Great for parties!

Chinese Throwing Croissant:  
You don’t actually need to do any alchemy with this. Any croissant left in a sylladex for 2 days will spontaneously turn into one of these. It does moderate damage.

Deluxe Feast:  
Potato Salad && Shroom Steak  
Strange Leaf && Wacka’s Bump

Restores 40 health and 40 pluck

  


Bio̓ͦ̂̈́ͩ̚p͐ͯ̆̚h̡ͫͮ̈́ͨoͫ̑̊̍ ̨̑̈̍̒ͬ͆ͦẻͣ͊͏҉ş͗̾̈́̿͗͗͐c͌ͩ͘ȇͥ̓̈ͪn̷ͧ̄͛ͭ̓͗͢͟e̡͑̃c͆̈́̀ ͬ͂ola  
Biophosphoradelecrystalluminescence && [Pretty much any soda I’ve tried]

This tastes great, gives you a nice bit of health (~50 points), and explodes spectacularly when shaken and thrown at a target. The resulting fizzy supernova heals on contact, so it’s best to throw at your friends. (“Why are you giving me that look? Your health vial was kinda low-ish. I’m just looking out for you, buddy.”)  
I think the game has trouble fitting “biophosphoradelecrystalluminescence cola” onto the captcha card. Wuss.  
(see the “Other Tips” section at the end of this guide for more tricks with soda)

Jack-o-Lantern  
Pumpkin && knife && candy  
Pumpkin && dead consort (???WTF???)  
Pumpkin && squiddle plushy

An inordinately creepy pumpkin with a scull carved for its face, filled with more sugary candy than your pancreas can handle. Eat fast, before it disappears…  
edit: huh, it just popped back into existence again. About gave a heart attack.  
edit2: OH FUCK IT’S FOLLOWING ME.

Imp à la Grecque:  
Tomato && Cheese && Imp Head

Health -27, pluck +200  
I swear on the grave of my rotting babushka, I did not find this recipe myself. This was sent in by alert reader ChortlingAugur. I just don’t want to know.

Fizzy Mana potion:  
Waybread && Biophosp(etc) cola.

Pluck +400  
Blue. Sweet. Tastes like bread. Gives me the jitters when I drink it, and it keeps me up all night. Replaced my coffee addiction.

Pan-galactic gargle blaster  
Ol’ Janx Spirit && Santarginus V || Arcturan Mega-gin && (Silver spoon || Qualactin Hypermint extract) && (Tooth of Algolian Suntiger && Zmphuor)) || olive  
Lemon && Gold Brick

I'm not sure what to say about these. I've never tried one myself. My Sage of Might swears by them and knocks one back every evening, but when I tried experimenting with one... it dissolved the gold brick.  
EDIT: well, apparently it can dissolve the Black Queen's ring, too. So, at least there's that.

Foods that duplicate well as-is  
Hot dogs  
Milk and butter (thank goodness)  
Peanut butter  
Saltine crackers  
A steak-and-eggs sandwich. (I’m not kidding, I’ve gotten 5 other people to confirm this. Weird, because neither steak, nor eggs, nor bread duplicate well on their own. I think I hate the programmers more and more every day.)  
Anything made entirely with Betty Crocker branded ingredients. Like, brownies, cake, etc.  
NOT Ice cream. I know; I’m sad too. Don’t try it, though – the result is too depressing.

 ****  
Other tips:  
  
Subtracting 00020100 from the code of any food item makes it kosher. I’m serious – try it.

The Black King has a big soft spot for chocolate shaped like an animal. (Don’t try to give him any during the reckoning, though.)

Tyranic Souschef (in the Prospit kitchens) has a secret crush on Jack Noir. If you end up working with Jack, try dropping some hints about “putting in a good word” and she’ll shower you with more food than you can eat.

You know how after the breeding quests you’re left with lots of frogs hopping around and generally making an ass of themselves? Turns out those buggers are delicious.

Exploding soda (sometimes known as OhGodCola)  
Now this one’s a little complicated, but it’s really not hard. It’s not useful in any dietary sense, but it’s too cool not to include here:  
\- Pick a soda  
\- Get the code for “can of [soda]” (where “[soda]” is whatever kind of soda you want) and “6x cans of [soda]” (not a 6-pack! That usually has a different code and won’t work for this trick)  
\- In general, you should see the codes are nearly identical, but the bits are different in the 2nd digit from the right, as well as digits 7 and 8. If you take the code for the 6x, but change the 2nd digit to whatever is in the 2nd place for the 1x, then you’ll get “[soda][soda][soda][soda][soda][soda]”. It will be 1 can, will look the same, but will explode violently if it is at all disrupted!

Tips:  
-this thing can blow up in your hands if you handle it too roughly. Don’t open it yourself.  
-Use less cans for less violence. 5 or more cans can injure someone. Rule of thumb: 2 cans = prank, 4 cans = hilarious prank, 6 cans = weapon.  
-Don’t try more than 7 cans. It’s not pretty.

 ****  
Contact:  
  
If you have any tips, recipes, or cautionary tales, lets hear ‘em in the comments! Both SBURB tips and regular-ol’ cooking ones. Feel free to share your own experiences, too.  



End file.
